Staff Software Engineer (SDK), Developer Tools

As a Staff Software Engineer (SDK) on the Developer Tools team, you will own the programming paradigms, interfaces, and developer experience that IonQ exposes to the world through its quantum SDKs. Your work will define how researchers, enterprises, and the broader open-source community write, optimize, and run quantum programs on IonQ hardware. You will lead the productization and open-sourcing of IonQ's quantum developer tools, setting the standard for usability, documentation, and community engagement across our public-facing SDK ecosystem.

This is a highly visible role at the boundary between IonQ's internal platform and the external developer community. You will set high-level technical standards for SDK architecture, mentor senior engineers and scientists, and provide deep expertise to solve the most challenging problems in quantum programming models, API design, and cross-platform integration. You will work across organizational boundaries, Applications, Compiler, and Engineering, to ensure that IonQ's SDKs are powerful, intuitive, and aligned with cutting-edge quantum research.

Your impact will be measured by the quality and adoption of IonQ's public SDK offerings, the health of our open-source communities, and the successful delivery of cross-functional projects that make quantum computing more accessible to every developer.

Responsibilities:

• Define the technical strategy and roadmap for IonQ's public-facing SDKs, including native SDKs and integrations with ecosystem frameworks (Qiskit, Cirq, Pennylane), ensuring long-term maintainability, performance, and developer adoption.
• Lead the productization and open-sourcing of internal quantum developer tools, establishing release processes, licensing, packaging, and community contribution workflows.
• Serve as the primary architect for the programming paradigms and abstractions IonQ exposes through its SDKs, ensuring they are expressive, ergonomic, and aligned with both current hardware capabilities and the broader quantum software ecosystem.
• Drive the design and implementation of robust, well-documented SDK interfaces for quantum circuit construction, compilation, simulation, and hardware execution.
• Steward IonQ's open-source presence, manage public repositories, triage community contributions, define contribution guidelines, and cultivate a healthy contributor ecosystem.
• Collaborate closely with applications research and compiler teams to evaluate, prototype, and surface novel quantum capabilities (e.g., error mitigation, advanced optimization techniques) as first-class SDK features.
• Oversee comprehensive documentation, examples, tutorials, and quickstart guides to ensure a world-class onboarding and developer experience.
• Establish best practices and mentor engineers on API design, software architecture, testing methodologies, and open-source maintainership.
• Act as a key technical resource for the Applications Engineering team, translating customer needs and partner requirements into SDK features and improvements.
• Champion continuous improvement in software engineering processes, automated testing, CI/CD, and validation standards across the SDK surface area.

You’d be a good fit with: 

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, or a related field, or equivalent training, fellowship, or work experience.
• 10+ years of